


in my bones, under my skin

by thoughtwewerefriends



Category: The Book of Mormon - Parker/Stone/Lopez
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Broken Bones, Implied/Referenced Sexual Assault, Injury, M/M, Soulmates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-25
Updated: 2018-12-25
Packaged: 2019-09-26 19:28:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,227
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17147738
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thoughtwewerefriends/pseuds/thoughtwewerefriends
Summary: It’s the autumn after he turns twelve that he learns what, exactly, being bonded to another human by pain is like.





	in my bones, under my skin

**Author's Note:**

> this is my gift for the BoM Secret Santa for baravioli on tumblr!!! i hope you enjoy!!!
> 
> warnings for: broken bones, burns, injury, mentioned (canon) sexual assault

It’s the autumn after he turns twelve that he learns what, exactly, being bonded to another human by pain is like.

He's in the car with his mother and his sisters, on the way home from school, when it starts: a sudden, sharp, shooting pain, tearing its way up his forearm. He shrieks loud enough that Jenny jumps and his mother almost hops a curb with how hard she swerves, knuckles white around the wheel as she stares at him in the rearview mirror. She's asking if he's okay, asking him what's wrong, asking why he's screaming, but he can't answer around the heavy shape of the scream on his tongue, the pain lighting up his brain behind his eyeballs.

At the hospital, the doctor can't find anything wrong with him, and Connor sits sniffling in the examination room while he talks in hushed whispers with his mother. Jenny strokes his hair and Sarah holds his left hand. The pain dulls, eventually, and his mother comes back in and ushers him out by the shoulder, silently. Questions about what was _wrong_ with him are ignored, hushed, and she only speaks once they're back home and Jenny has taken Sarah upstairs. They sit down in the living room, and his father is there, and he feels anxious with the two of them sitting on the edge of their seats on the sofa while he perches in the armchair, fingers rubbing circles into the skin on the inside of his wrist. _(Something is wrong, something is very wrong, why won’t anyone listen to him?)_

They tell him that this is something special. He’s twelve years old, and he’s feeling the pain of another person, carrying it around on his shoulders. His parents explain that they’ve felt each other’s pain since they were children, and his mother recounts with a smile on her face (and isn’t that just strange?) that her very first memory of their bond was when Connor’s father slipped on a diving board and landed hard on his back at the edge of a pool. His father’s first was when Connor’s mother broke her collarbone working on her grandmother’s farm.

He stares down at his wrist for a long, long while, lips pursed and brow furrowed, thinking hard. His _soulmate_ , they tell him. His soulmate is who’s done this to him, wherever she may be, _who_ ever she may be. He rubs a slow circuit around the knob of his wrist, nods like he understands, and asks to be excused to his room. He doesn’t bring it up again, but his wrist aches, dull, for weeks, and every time it gets cold.

******************

It’s the summer before he turns fifteen that he learns what, exactly, being bonded to another human by pain is like.

He’s running drills on the soccer pitch with the rest of the team, in the middle of a lap around, laughing and sucking in the warm, dry air, when his knees suddenly give out from under him, and he hits the ground, hard and with his face. His mouth is full of grass and the shoulder of his faded old uniform shirt is instantly streaked with dirt, but he’s too busy trying to get his jaw clamped tight around the scream that tears out of his lungs. Pain like he’s never experienced before shoots through him, pounding in time with his heart beat, so hard and so sharp that he can feel it in his gums. The coach calls an ambulance, and he insists that he doesn’t need to go to the hospital, that he’ll be fine, that he didn’t _do_ anything to warrant medical attention. These are the phantom pains. The ones that come out of nowhere, the ones that crop up while he’s sitting in class, in church. Dull aches that leave him feeling just a little bit confused and just a lot bit _curious_.

(He knows, really. Everyone _knows_. Kids who don’t know, who haven’t felt, get made fun of, and Kevin has been known to falsify a wrist sprain or a twisted ankle, so as not to feel left out.)

The doctor explains the inevitable, tells him that whoever has the other half of his soul must have torn something. She makes a joke about Kevin being a lucky guy, landing with what must be a gymnast, or an athlete, and he laughs, but it sounds hollow. It’d been easy to ignore, up until now, but it seems that his reality does, in fact, include a single person for the rest of his life. 

He prays every night, every morning, and wishes on every shooting star that they’re the type of soul mates that meet when they’re old, that they never come across each other at all, that the bond will fade and he’ll never have to look into another person’s eyes and know that they know each other on such an intimate level. His knee aches every Monday morning at nine-thirty in the morning, and he adds it to the list of things that he’s come to dislike about her.

******************

He’s eighteen, this time, when he’s overcome with another wave of pain. This one comes on like spice -- subtle, and then suddenly overwhelming, overpowering. Kevin’s palm feels scorching hot, almost too suddenly, and he lets out one loud, sharp exclamation before heading to the sink, shoving his younger brother out of the way and yanking on the cold tap, shoving his hand underneath. He takes slow, deep breaths, and ignores Jack in his ear, insisting that his hand really looks red, and _how_ did he manage to burn himself drying dishes, _Kevin_?

When he finally shuts off the tap, he examines his skin closely, left in right, squinting hard. His skin _does_ look red, and it’s tender, and he knows his soul mate is sitting out there, somewhere in the world, carefully treating what has to be blistering flesh. In one single, brief, uncharacteristic moment, he thinks about what it might be like to _help_. To hold her hand long enough to rub on burn gel, stroke her fingers, hit her with a smile and a _good as new_.

Almost immediately, he regrets it. He recoils from the thought like _that’s_ what had burned him, feeling something akin to disgust, turning the look on Jack when he laughs. He’s asked what the stinkface is about, and he insists that it’s because he wishes he could be finished with this _stupid soul bond thing_. (Because that’s all it is. That’s all it is, Heavenly Father, did you hear that?)

******************

 

He thinks, maybe, very briefly, for one heart-shattering second, that Chris is his soul mate. (And wouldn’t that be the kicker, after all of the therapy he’d been through, after three whole years of shoving every single thought that flitted through his mind into a neat little box in the dusty corridors of his brain?) Chris had broken his wrist, too, when he was young, but after just a bit more digging, it comes to light that the timing doesn’t match up. When he was twelve, yes, but it was winter, he’d slipped and fallen on black ice, running to catch the school bus.

Their friendship grows fast, and Connor finds himself confiding things in Chris that he’s never uttered aloud to another human being before. They lay in bed for almost an hour after lights-out each night, facing each other on their narrow cots and whispering through the dark. Chris tells him about his sister, about his father, and in return, Connor offers up details about what exactly had happened at dance camp, the summer before his junior year of high school. _Matthew_.

Chris doesn’t tell him to turn to God to ask forgiveness. He tells him that it must have been hard, sympathizes, understands, and Connor cries three nights in a row thinking about how they may never speak again once they both fly home, because he’s never known friendship like this.

He’s sitting in his office, running over numbers, mumbling fast and furious as he scribbles in his notebook. It’s mostly for himself, but Chris still nods along, bobs his little blond head like the obedient little golden retriever puppy he is at heart, and Connor is sure he’s never loved another human being more -- of that, he’s certain.

He’s hit by pain again as he’s working out how to divide their money between building a schoolhouse and getting vitamin supplements in large enough quantities to be meaningful. It’s short and dull, centered around his right elbow, and he lets his mind wander for exactly three seconds as he imagines his soulmate, out there somewhere. Knocking her elbow on the edge of a countertop, stumbling and falling. (It makes his head spin to think about it too long, and he finds that he’s gained a renewed interest in the spreadsheet in front of him.)

The door to the hut swings open and shut as he’s drying his hands on one of their white-turned-grey hand towels, and he frowns at himself in the mirror, running a quick roll-call in his head. No one was out proselytizing -- it was too late. They’d already eaten dinner, for crying out loud. He pokes his head out the door, only shuffling out into the living area at the sound of a voice. Before him stands two _new_ boys, who both turn to look at him in unison, two pairs of big brown eyes hitting him at once, and he feel just a little bit overwhelmed for all of two seconds.

(Pause. Breathe.)

He turns over his shoulder, calling down the hall to the other boys. They flood out in a wave of wonky collars and crooked ties, and Connor pushes his tongue against the inside of his cheek, resisting the urge to chastise them, to tell them off for looking like _this_ when they’ve got _company_.

Hands get shaken, introductions are made, and Connor finds himself flexing his fingers sympathetically as Elder Neeley clasps the new recruit’s hands in both of his own. He can practically feel the bones in his own hand creaking, the way they had when they’d all met the first time.

Connor leads the two new missionaries to the empty room at the end of the hall, hands folded in front of him as they file in and examine their quarters. The taller of the two (Elder Price, _the_ Elder Price, the one sent straight from Salt Lake to turn everything around here) turns to him as he starts to close the door, lifts his arm.

“Is there a first-aid kit laying around here?” he asks, displaying a skinned elbow and a sheepish smile that is so clearly put-on, but that affects Connor in ways that leave him a little dizzy and a little nauseous. “Had a little run-in with the locals.”

Connor, without thinking, rubs his own elbow, and blood rushes in his ears so loud that he feels like he must be underwater. (Coincidence, he thinks, as he fetches a bandaid and one of their very few alcohol wipes. Nothing more than that. Can’t be.)

******************

It’s a pain like he’s never felt before. He doesn’t have the word to describe it, doesn’t have the brain power to figure out exactly what it is that he’s feeling. The one thing that he is sure of is that he wouldn’t wish it on anyone else, wouldn’t want anyone to understand this. (The fact that someone else is feeling it is enough to bring fresh tears to his eyes, and he presses his face against the rough surface of the hospital bed underneath him. Sobs shudder out of him against his will, and Kevin Price feels farther away from God than he ever has.)

******************

It’s been a few weeks since their excommunication. _The Big Event_ as Arnold is calling it, _The Great Fuck-You_ in Elder Church’s words. Kevin calls it just another day, as if turning his back on everything that he’s ever known, on his family and his life and his faith, is something he’s used to doing. (He’s always been a very black-or-white person, and maybe that was his number one downfall. Maybe it’s the part of him that makes him hard to be around.)

He’s on his hands and knees with a trowel in his hand, turning over soil for a garden that they’ve blocked out behind the hut after Elder McKinley’s -- _Connor’s_ , he corrects himself, because they use _first names_ now -- math showed it’d be cheaper and more rewarding to grow what they could grow on their own, rather than hunting for fresh produce at the market. Three feet away kneels Connor himself, brow furrowed and cheeks smudged with dirt. His freckles stand out against the bright pink of his nose, and he looks absolutely focused on his task until he notices Kevin staring.

He says, “Is there something on my face?” and Kevin has never met someone as cliche as Connor in all of his life. He’s certain of it when the other boy lifts his hand and smudges even more dirt across his chin.

Kevin shakes his head, but a minute later, he’s drawing in breath and his mouth is falling open and words are drip, drip, dripping out from between his lips, because Connor has always been the one who was the easiest to talk to after Arnold here in what he imagines is his purgatory. Connor’s face flies through the five stages of grief in the span of three minutes, and then he throws down his trowel and crawls across the plot to Kevin, sitting close enough that their knees press together.

Connor’s eyes are so blue, and Kevin’s stomach twists itself into knots.

“Do you want to talk about it?” he whispers, and his hand lifts like he might want to reach for Kevin’s, but it finds its way back to twine with the other in his lap. “I’m here for you,” he says, quietly determined, when Kevin shakes his head.

Kevin nods this time, wrapping the fingers of his left hand around his right wrist, squeezing tight, rubbing gently. He says that he feels the rain coming, that he broke his wrist when he was eleven and that it hasn’t been the same with the weather ever since.

Connor smiles, but Kevin catches a glimpse of _something else_ from the corner of his eye -- a look that makes him think, stupidly, that Connor had already known that.

******************

They don’t talk about it, but Connor knows. He knows more than Kevin _knows_ he knows, and for that, he feels immensely guilty. The only person he has to talk about this new discovery -- only probably, only likely, not anything _certain_ , because God wouldn’t pull that sort of joke on him, would He? -- is Chris, and those talks only serve to confirm his worst fears. Things are happening outside of his control, and he doesn’t like the way the tides are turning.

He spends most of his free time (which is almost all of his time now, really, now that they don't have to go out and recruit) dreaming up ways to tell Kevin. To spill the beans, to open up, to grab this ridiculous boy by the shoulders and shake him and cry so they could figure out together how, exactly, this could be fixed. Reversed. Undone.

The opportunity presents itself in the form of a lazy afternoon lounging around the hut. Kevin is sprawled out in a patch of shade on the floor, and Connor is on their sagging, beat-up old sofa, and they're _talking_. Swapping stories and laughing, like maybe they're friends, even if Connor knows that they never would have been close like this if it wasn't for the random lottery that had stuck them in the same place at the same time.

“What do you want to be when you grow up?” Kevin asks, but immediately answers the question himself: “A dancer, right? You'd be good at that.”

Connor smiles his saddest smile and shakes his head, heaving a sigh. He tells Kevin that he messed up his knee, back when he was in high school, an injury that lent itself well to his parents forcing him to quit his stupid little hobby. Kevin looks equal parts infuriated and confused, and when he asks Connor _when_ that happened, Connor can tell he knows before the answer before it's said. He blinks a few times, rubs his own knee, and Connor wonders if he's aware just how obvious he's being.

“Elder McKinley,” Kevin says, brow furrowed, hand still squeezing his knee. “Connor, I think.” He cuts himself off there, but his brown eyes burn hot as they stare into Connor's, and they don't soften until Connor nods.

Slowly, Kevin scoots his way across the floor, using his feet to push him along on his back, and he snatches up Connor's left hand where it dangles off the couch, knuckles brushing the dirty floor. Connor knows that he's got a scar right in the crease of his palm, from picking up a pot that was far too hot, but he didn't know until just then how nice it could be for a boy to press a kiss there. (He's thought about Kevin pressing kisses against his skin more and more often lately, and he knows that he should stop, but he can't seen to get control of his runaway train of a mind.)

“You were supposed to be a girl,” Kevin laments from the floor, but he laughs hard when Connor points out that this wasn't his grand scheme, and that Kevin should take it up with Heavenly Father if he wants a change, because _Connor_ certainly wouldn't mind a break from the wrist aches.

“I think I like it, just like this,” he hears Kevin whisper. Their fingers slide together, and Connor's face glows red.

******************

He hears the exclamation at the exact same time that he feels the sharp, stabbing pain in his right hand, and he immediately drops the handful of cutlery he'd been haphazardly stuffing into their silverware drawer. Sighing, he made his way around the corner and down the short hall, pushing open the door to their bedroom.

“Sorry!” Connor hisses, flipping furiously through an instruction booklet, pieces of their bed frame scattered around him. “The fricking screwdriver slipped.” There's a sigh, and then blue eyes are turning up toward him. “You should really be doing this,” he says miserably. “You know I'm bad at these things.” His little pout turns into a grin when Kevin agrees, and he hops to his feet, picking his way across the bedroom, stopping directly in Kevin's space.

He presses a kiss to his own scraped palm, then lays his hand in Kevin's, a ritual that Connor had made up when they were still in Uganda. (Kevin had thought it stupid, at first, but now it makes his heart warm up and blossom open.)

Connor stands on his toes to press a kiss to Kevin's lips, squeezes his hand, and disappears out of the bedroom in the blink of an eye, laughing all the way to the kitchen, and Kevin sits down in the wreckage Connor had left, smile on his face and heart feeling light.

He is twenty when he learns that fantastic love can grow from fantastic pain.

**Author's Note:**

> hope you enjoyed!!! feel free to hit me up on tumblr at [officialmckinley](http://officialmckinley.tumblr.com), or drop me some kudos & comments here!


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